BURUNDI ARCHIVES: POLICY AND LEGISLATIVE FRAMEWORK

Abstract

The paper discusses the situation at Burundi Archives in modern society, its role, development and future. It provides an overview of the current socio-political and economic environment after four decades of civil war that prevailed in Burundi, as is well known, at periods from independence in 1962 to the present. \nRecent research findings regarding current record keeping initiatives in the public and private sector in Burundi and their effect on service delivery are presented. Included is the recent project initiated by the International Records Management Trust through its East Africa regional research project conducted by archivists and records managers on “Aligning records management with e-Government/Information Communication Technology and freedom of information in East Africa”. \nThe key characteristics of economic advancement in Africa are transparency, responsibility, accountability, participation of all the people, both men and women, and responsiveness to the peoples’ needs. The general intention behind this paper is to present the legal and policy framework regarding freedom of information, ICT and e-Government initiatives and national plans, records management and archives issues. Nowadays, development is to a large extent achieved through the documentation of decision processes and actions, and by making the resulting documentation accessible to the citizens. This presentation will provide an opportunity to describe key government bodies, their mandate, structure, staffing, training and role in preserving the memory of society, through, for example, the creation, management and dissemination of trustworthy records, which will further be referred to as record-keeping. \nThe paper concludes by positing that Burundi archives are underutilized as information sources. This is partly due to professional problems like lack of recognition of archives by governments, obsolete legislation, lack of professional training and advocacy, inadequate service, and inadequate or non-existent access tools. Another factor is lack of appropriate hardware and software and user-friendly systems, lack of knowledge using information technology, costs, and the vulnerability of digital information. Finally, the paper will discuss the challenge of record-keeping and some of opportunities in the digital society.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.